Currently there are a number of solutions for performing close-up focus stacking photography. Existing solutions involve the use of a conventional macro rail that assists a user with taking focus-stacked photographs manually. These solutions fail to meet the needs of the industry because they suffer drawbacks related to lack of accuracy, reproducibility, speed and precision. In addition, manual focusing rails cannot be used at sub-millimeter step increments. Manually adjusting the rail can also cause inadvertent movement of a camera during photograph collection. Such movement causes parallax error and misalignment of images which focus stacking software may not be able to correct. While there exists software to stack photographs that can handle some displacement, such software cannot compensate for movement of the rail that occurs while the photograph is captured which causes the photographs to be blurry and ultimately result in a bad stack and unusable or compromised quality.
Additionally, speed in collecting images for focus stacking is important when capturing subjects (e.g. an insect or flower) in the natural world since such subjects do not typically remain still. In the manual method the macro rail and camera each need to be controlled independently thus causing undesirable time delay between photographs. Existing systems also suffer drawbacks related to precisely controlling the distance of movement of the camera between each photograph.
It would be desirable to have a device that simplifies the process of collecting images for focus-stacking photography. It would also be desirable to have a device that allows images for focus-stacked photography to be collected with greater speed, accuracy and precision than existing systems in order to produce a focus-stacked photograph with an improved depth of field. Improvements to devices and methods for performing close-up focus-stacking photography are thus desired.